Programming on Paper

Another thing that annoys me (sort-of related to the above) is the common, and IMHO silly job interview question 'Do you know C?' (or some other programming language). If I wanted a programmer, I'd much rather have somebody who didn't know the particular language I was going to use, but who did understand things like data structures, recursion, stacks, pointers, analysis of algorithms, stability of algorithms, etc. Because I know that sort of person could learn just about any language in under a week given the standards documents. Whereas the person who'd been on a C course (and thus 'knows C') may well be able to write trivial programs in that language, but will probably not be able to write large programs well (if at all). Still, what do I know? I'm not, and never have been, a programmer. -tony

From what I see in the programming field, more and more programmers are